And now it's time for me to move on to the year 1992 with sci-fi stories, and to a new book in Gardner Dozois' excellent annual anthology series, The Year's Best Science Fiction, Tenth Annual Collection. At that time...and for three more years...I was working at my local post office processing center (I'm still there) sorting mail on their flat sorting machine on Tour I, which is postal jargon for the graveyard shift. Let's see, I started working there in 1987, and in the nearly 36 years since then, I've done that shift in varying capacities for half that time...I'll have to write an article sometime about the pros and cons of working the wee hours of the morning. But for now, here are my reactions to the first four tales in the anthology...
GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Stanwick
On a future sparsely populated Moon relying on natural resource production, industry and research, the leading team there endures a special bomb attack from a warring Earth of which the exploded agent turns most of the population into a hypnotic/paranoid trance state. The fight for survival is on...how will the war back home end, and will it happen in time to rescue them? The ending of this long, pretty contrived novella with numerous subplots delivers a surprise regarding the possible future of humanity, but I admit to having some difficulty tying it all together...
EVEN THE QUEEN by Connie Willis
Only a woman could have gotten away with writing this brief satirical piece about a future in which a new innovation has "liberated" women everywhere from having to undergo the vicissitudes of menstruation as well as its accompanying PMS. But wait, a new feminist group has formed, trying to "liberate" women from their "liberation" and returning them to their monthly cycles. As a male reader, I was content to just sit back and let them duke it out...
THE ROUND-EYED BARBARIANS by L. Sprague de Camp
Suppose that China's Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) had developed the technological innovations and seafaring impetus just decades before the Europeans began their colonial assaults on the Americas. The "round-eyes", as they're called in this alternative history tale, would surely be in an entirely different and less advantageous situation. A Chinese official relates his experiences regarding one such soldier as Chinese, European, and Native American cultural norms clash in the New (and Different) World...I thought it was kind of boring, to be perfectly blunt...
DUST by Greg Egan
A story with an interesting premise that lets itself get muddled toward the end with a lot of esoteric metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. A man, Paul Durham, narrates it in the first person present as he wakes up and soon discovers that he is a digitally created copy of himself: it soon becomes apparent when he discovers the limits of his new world with the backgrounds necessarily vague and artificial. He knows of his creator's every motive since, of course, he is a copy of him! What the original Paul Durham doesn't know, though, is that this copy has life and a sense of identity in spite of his non-biological nature...which leads the (copied) Paul down that long and winding road of metaphysical cognitive reverie. But then again, the ending helps to make up for all that...nice surprise!
Next week: more from 1992...
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